To stand on the shoulder of giants, we first have to find them. In Radio Galaxy Zoo, we are of course referring to the hunt for Giant Radio Galaxies. These Giants can provide us with valuable insights into the environment in which they reside as well as the evolution of radio AGN. In this post, I will present a summary of the highlights that Heinz A. has reported on RGZ’s search for Giants in 2016.

As of late September 2016, RGZ citizen scientists have uncovered at least 313 Giant candidates which are larger than 1 Mpc in projected size. Of the 313, 201 are new discoveries made by RGZ! Of course, follow-up observations and further verification checks are required. However, this is still fantastic job and no small feat by the team. A big thank you goes to RG Zooite Antikodon & Dolorous_Edd for paving the way again and discovering ~78% of these Giant candidates. To put things into perspective, if one wanted to extract a list of Giants from the NASA Extragalactic Database (NED; a well-known archive used by professional astronomers) one would find only 55 objects tagged as Giant Radio Galaxies! This is partly due to the fact that in publications such objects are not always explicitly labelled as such. Here is Heinz’s table comparing the properties of the published Giants versus the newly-discovered RGZ candidates :

Property

Published

New RGZ candidates

Number

231

201

Median redshift

0.26

0.57

Median linear size (Mpc)

1.3

1.18

Number (size> 2 Mpc)

29

6

It is clear that RGZ is leading the pack in collating and cataloguing these unusual radio galaxies. With our upcoming observing run using the Gemini-North 8-meter telescope in Hawaii, we will be following up several of these candidates.

FIRST image of an example of one of the largest known Giant Radio Galaxy J1102+1345

My warmest congratulations again to the Giants Team! Keep up the fantastic work. After all, we still have a third of RGZ to complete and I am sure more Giant candidates will be discovered in 2017. More information can be found at the Giant team’s RadioTalk Discussion thread.

This end-of-year post is written by Jean Tate, an RGZ citizen scientist and associate science team member who is providing us with the 2016 update on her team’s hunt for more Spiral Double Radio-lobe AGNs — SDRAGNs. My warmest congratulations again to the SDRAGN Team! I will be sure to look out for more SDRAGN news in 2017. More information can be found at the SDRAGN team’s RadioTalk Discussion thread.

—————————————-

A small band of intrepid scientists – citizen and regular – have been hunting SDRAGNs for quite some time now. These strange beasts were mythical, until 1998 when one was spotted above the Antipodes (it goes by the highly memorable name of 0313-192 … not). Since then a dozen or so other Spiral galaxies which host Double Radio lobes (and which have Active Galactic Nuclei; SDRAGN, get it?) have been bagged. With thousands of sharp-eyed citizen scientists, RGZ is an ideal place to look for more.

It has been relatively easy to find SDRAGN candidates – two known ones were flagged by RGZooites, who were quite unaware of their status – but rather more challenging to turn candidates into certainties; for example, chance alignments can appear very convincing. Anyway, from ~a thousand “possibles”, the SDRAGN team picked ten really promising ones, and is now writing up a paper on them (actually, while doing some final checks, two of the ten turned out to be imposters; never mind, there are dozens more good candidates for a second paper). Curiously, one of the most difficult questions was (and still is) “is this really a spiral?”

The figure above shows J1649+26, an SDRAGN published by Minnie M. in 2015 (URL Link to her paper). The red contours represent the double radio lobes emanating from the supermassive black hole of this galaxy.

You can see some of the SDRAGN candidates in RGZ Talk, by searching for the hashtag #SDRAGN (some will also have the hashtag #spiral; many candidates do not have either hashtag). If you find an SDRAGN candidate, please include the #SDRAGN hashtag in your comment.

In 2016, you have all contributed to more than 16 years of continuous classification and our project is now two-thirds of its way to completion and what a year it has been!

The biggest science news coming out of Radio Galaxy Zoo this year will have to be the official publication of the Matorny-Terentev cluster of galaxies, (RGZ-CL J0823.2+0333) –named after two of our super-Zooites who discovered the Giant Wide-Angle Tail galaxy (shown in white contours to the left, Banfield et al 2016). We have also made great progress across several RadioTalk projects such as the Giants, the Spiral-DRAGNs, the Green DRAGNs and the HyMoRS. Therefore, we will be providing more detailed updates from the team leaders in the coming weeks so please stay tuned for more exciting Radio Galaxy Zoo science highlights from 2016.

Our science team has also been evolving and this year, we bade farewell to Kyle W. and Chris S. who are pursuing new adventures and we sincerely thank them for all the fish. We also saw the arrival and departure of Tim F., our ANU outreach student who worked with Julie and we hope that you have enjoyed his blog posts earlier this year.

This year, the RGZ science team welcomes Meg Schwamb from Gemini Observatory (who helped with the Chinese translation of RGZ) and Jean Tate, the first RGZ citizen scientist to become an associate member of the RGZ science team. Meg will be helping us with the upcoming RGZ follow-up observations using the Gemini telescope.

We also have a new student joining our team and working with Julie in the coming year. Meet James L., a PhD Candidate in Science Communication at the Australian National Centre for the Public Awareness of Science. He completed his Bachelor of Science (Hons) in 2015 at the Australian National University with a double major in Astronomy/Astrophysics and Science Communication. I am sure that you’ll hear more from James himself in the coming year.

Thank you all very much for your support again. We are most grateful for your help thus far. To finish the remaining third of the project, we seek your help in the coming days, months & year to complete this monumental task.

On Radio Galaxy Zoo’s 2nd birthday, we wish to thank you all for achieving more than 1.42 million classifications (~57.2 years of work)! That is an extra 20 years of classifications just in the last year. We are nearly at the halfway mark now so we are cheering you all on for the great effort and dedication that many of you have shown.

So what has the science team done in the last year with your classifications? Our first refereed paper has been published.

Anna Kapinska’s HyMoRS paper has been submitted for publication and we have another 3 papers on the sidelines in preparation and awaiting submission in the next few months.

And we have also submitted several proposals to conduct follow-up observations of the many interesting systems that you all have found!

Thank you all very much for your support again. We are most grateful for your help thus far. However, we still have more than half of our sample to classify. So we are seeking your help in the coming days, months & year to complete this monumental task.

First science paper on hybrid morphology radio galaxies found through Radio Galaxy Zoo project has now been submitted!

In the paper we have revised the definition of the hybrid morphology radio galaxy (HyMoRS or hybrids) class. In general, HyMoRS show different Fanaroff-Riley radio morphology on either side of the active nucleus, that is FRI type on one side and FRII on the other side of their infrared host galaxy. But we found that this wasn’t very precise, and set up a clear definition of these sources, which is:

”To minimise the misclassification of HyMoRS, we attempt to tighten the original morphological classification of radio galaxies in the scope of detailed observational and analytical/numerical studies undertaken in the past 30 years. We consider a radio source to be a HyMoRS only if

(i) it has a well-defined hotspot on one side and a clear FR I type jet on the other, though we note the hotspots may `flicker’, that is their brightness may be rapidly variable (Saxton et al. 2002), and, in the case the radio source has a very prominent core or is highly asymmetric,

(ii) its core prominence does not suggest strong relativistic beaming nor its asymmetric radio structure can be explained by differential light travel time effects. ”

Based on this we revised hybrids reported in scientific literature and found 18 objects that satisfy our criteria. With Radio Galaxy Zoo during the first year of its operation, through our fantastic RadioTalk, you guys now nearly doubled this number finding another 14 hybrids, which we now confirm! Two examples from the paper are below:

The project description and early science paper (results from Year 1) for the Radio Galaxy Zoo project has been submitted!

We find that the RGZ citizen scientists are as effective as the science experts at identifying the radio sources and their host galaxies.

Based upon our results from 1 year of operation, we find the RGZ host galaxies reside in 3 primary loci of mid-infrared colour space. The mid-infrared colour space is defined by the WISE filter bands: W1, W2 and W3, corresponding to 3.4, 4.6 and 12 microns; respectively.

Approximately 10% of the RGZ sample reside in the mid-IR colour space dominated by elliptical galaxies, which have older stellar populations and are less dusty, hence resulting in bluer (W2-W3) colours. The 2nd locus (where ~15% of RGZ sources are found) lies in the colour space known as the `AGN wedge’, typically associated with X-ray-bright QSOs and Seyferts. And lastly, the largest concentration of RGZ host galaxies (~30%) can be found in the 3rd locus usually associated with luminous infrared galaxies (LIRGs). It should be noted that only a small fraction of LIRGs are associated with late-stage mergers. The remainder of the RGZ host population are distributed along the loci of both star-forming and active galaxies, indicative of radio emission from star-forming galaxies and/or dusty elliptical (non-star-forming) galaxies. See the figure below for a plot of these results.

Caption to figure: WISE colour-colour diagram, showing sources from the WISE all-sky catalog (colourmap), 33,127 sources from the 75% RGZ catalog (black contours), and powerful radio galaxies (green points) from (Gürkan et al. 2014). The wedge used to identify IR colours of X-ray-bright AGN from Lacy et al. (2004) & Mateos et al. (2012) is overplotted (red dashes). Only 10% of the WISE all-sky sources have colours in the X-ray bright AGN wedge; this is contrasted with 40% of RGZ and 49% of the Gürkan et al. (2014) radio galaxies. The remaining RGZ sources have WISE colours consistent with distinct populations of elliptical galaxies and LIRGs, with smaller numbers of spiral galaxies and starbursts.

In addition, we will also be submitting our paper on Hybrid Morphology Radio Sources (HyMoRS) in the next few days so stay tuned!

As always, thank you all very much for all your help and support and keep up the awesome work!

Huzzah! We have now broken through the 1 million mark with Radio Galaxy Zoo as of January 16, 2015. It has taken all of you ~13 months to do 40 years worth of cross-identifications. Well done and a huge thank you to every single one of you out there who helped us along.

A big shout-out to the winners of our 1 millionth classification milestone competition. The winners are: @planetari7, @ChrisMolloy, @leonie van vliet, @antikodon, @BOSSARD louis michel and @JF45456. I will be e-mailing each of you soon.

My biggest thank you to every single Radio Galaxy Zooite who helped us get this far. We really could not have done this without you.

What a wonderful year it has been! In 1 year, we have completed ~30% of the project and have reached nearly 1 million classifications! In celebration of our anniversary, we are announcing that we will offer some special prizes to the first few citizen scientist(s) who take us to the 1 millionth classification and beyond! The top prizes we have to offer include a signed copy of “Bang! — the complete history of the Universe” signed by Brian May & Chris Lintott, a black ICRAR T-shirt (in your size), a CSIRO water bottle, CSIRO mugs, 3D telescope bookmarks and some Zooniverse stickers.

First prize for the RGZooite who helps us reach 1 million classification gets a signed copy of “Bang!” !

Using the current number of classifications of 931,029 and assuming that each classification took 5 minutes, this translates to a continuous working time of nearly 9 years! If we assume that one can only classify continuously over a standard 40-hour work-week, it’d take more than 37 years to complete what you all have so kindly done in 1 year!

In addition to matching the radio jets with their black holes, we (the citizen scientists & the science team) are making new discoveries of extreme types of radio galaxies. Just a few days after launch last year, @Dolorous_Edd and @antikodon discovered a very large nearby wide-angle tailed radio galaxy. They are currently working with Prof Rudnick and Prof Andernach on publishing their findings and analysis. Large teams of RGZ citizen scientists are also helping Dr Kapinska and Dr Mao with their search for Hybrids and S-DRAGNs, respectively!

Thank you all so very much for your support! We are most grateful for such a humbling effort by everyone. We hope that all of you have a wonderful holiday period and wishing you all a great upcoming year!

Meet Minnie Mao, leading the study of spiral double radio lobe AGNs (or S-DRAGNs) for Radio Galaxy Zoo.

Hello! My name is Minnie and I am a VLA postdoc at NRAO in Socorro, NM. Astronomers use a lot of acronyms, and often are not very creative with telescope names/ VLA stands for ‘Very Large Array’, which is where some of the Radio Galaxy Zoo radio images come from!

I did my PhD at the University of Tasmania with Ray Norris (yup, THE Ray Norris), Jim Lovell, and Rob Sharp. We used optical data cross-matched with radio data from the ATCA (Australia Telescope Compact Array, where the rest of the RGZ radio images come from) to determine how galaxies have changed across cosmic time. A large chunk of the PhD was spent staring at images of radio galaxies, classifying their morphology, and determining their counterparts in optical/infrared images. While this can be a lot of fun, the Universe is rather large so I am glad I can now share this job with the wonderful zoo-ites!

One of my primary reasons for being involved in RGZ is because I am excited for the day when radio images become as familiar to people as optical images. To this end I hope you enjoy RGZ, because really, what is more fun than peering far back into the nether-reaches of the Universe?

Meet Julie (aka @42jkb on RadioTalk), a project scientist on Radio Galaxy Zoo!

I’m a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science in Australia. This is my first position after obtaining my PhD from the University of Calgary, Canada working on magnetic fields of radio galaxies. My first memories of astronomy and the wonders of the Universe were spending summer nights outside at campfires with my family staring up and counting the number of “shooting stars” we could see. It wasn’t until my second year of undergraduate studies at Western University in Ontario Canada that I considered doing astrophysical research; I was actually going through to be an airline pilot! I haven’t looked back at my decision to change into physics and astronomy and everyday I am amazed at the complexity and beauty of the Universe.

I spend my time researching magnetic fields and how important they are to radio galaxies. You can usually find me at the Australia Telescope Compact Array taking observations of all types of radio galaxies, sitting in front of a computer doing the exact same thing as Radio Galaxy Zoo, learning about life from my daughter, and educating myself on the wonderful country I now live in. I am excited about what Radio Galaxy Zoo has to offer the astronomical community and what the Universe will unfold for us through this project. Thank you for taking part!